Saving the Twentieth Century Transcript

Saving the Twentieth Century Transcript Date: Wednesday, 2 November 2016 - 6:00PM Location: Museum of London 2 November 2016 Saving the Twentieth Century Professor Simon Thurley For some, twentieth-century buildings are not heritage, but for an increasing number, they are the most threatened buildings in Britain. Post war modernism is now at the centre of the hardest fought and most controversial conservation debates. Which buildings, if any, should be listed and what should the criteria be? How far can experimental buildings of the 1960s and '70s be altered for new uses? Should there be new rules for a new era of conservation? This evening I want to talk about the most controversial and difficult area of modern conservation practice and debate – saving the late twentieth century. Deciding to preserve, in some way, the architecture of the previous generation has always been difficult and unpopular. The Victorians hated Regency buildings and, Victorian buildings, in their turn, were hated after the Second World War. So, simply in terms of the swing of the generational pendulum of taste, we would be on an uphill struggle to list and conserve post war architecture. But in terms of the late twentieth century we are facing a problem at once more complex and more subtle than that. Modernist architecture and its more aggressive subset brutalist architecture are styles that came about through circumstances quite different from any that came before in England. This is because the roots of the style were not native roots. I say this not in a xenophobic sense but in the sense that the ideas and aspirations that lay behind modernism were not shared by the majority of people who saw it being built. Architects of the period 1950 to 1970 had successfully persuaded the power elites of the time that they had the solution to social and economic problems and they were given free reign to conduct an experiment on a population who initially were tentatively optimistic about what they saw but quickly came to be suspicious then outright hostile. As political support collapsed we were left with a large quantity of buildings that had only ever had very shallow roots in society. This is I believe a unique situation and the passing of time has only made very shallow inroads into it. Although there are many educated people in their 20s and 30s who now appreciate and admire modernist design, including modernist and brutalist buildings, we are probably at a high water of support and admiration; because the popular imagination has not been captured and probably never will be. This is why when modernist buildings are listed or worse when public money is spent on conserving them there is a storm of protest. I remember the rage directed at English Heritage when I authorised a huge re-direction of effort to kick-start the restoration of the Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. The bile and anger directed at us and me personally quite took me aback. Post war modernism is quite simply ‘ghastly modern architecture’ to most people today. So we are dealing with something unusual and interesting, and challenging to say the least. Tonight I want to ask whether we are going about it in the right way and if not what improvements we can make to the way we deal with conserving the legacy of British Modernism. I want to start by talking about a listed building consent case that English Heritage considered in 2004-5. This was an application for listed building and conservation area consent for the demolition and redevelopment of the grade II listed Southside Hall of Residence built for Imperial College by Sheppard Robson Architects between 1960 – 1968. It was listed because of the way they introduced the style of Le Corbuiser to university architecture, fusing the principles of Oxbridge planning with great slab blocks of reinforced concrete. Imperial College, the owners, argued that the student accommodation had from the start demonstrated serious design, technical and functional flaws to such an extent that retaining them in their present form or even heavily remodelled would be questionable, both functionally and economically. Interestingly this was a point of view that was ultimately accepted by English Heritage. This was an extraordinary decision on the face of it. For EH to support a Listed building consent application for the demolition of a grade II building that everyone agreed was actually possible to repair – although at a £40m cost. On the economic side this is a problem faced by hundreds of highly graded buildings each year - the fact that the repair costs are greater than the eventual value of a building. What about a grade I listed medieval church in the middle of nowhere? It has a £1m repair bill; even if permission could be granted for its conversion to a house it would only be worth £100,000 at most. So do we say well, let’s demolish it? Do we say that functionally it is useless? Liturgical practice has changed so much since the thirteenth century that its design is now flawed beyond adaptation? No, of course we don’t. So why could we contemplate such a conclusion for Southside? Are there special factors at work here? Does modernism need its own philosophy of conservation? These questions were some of a wider group of problems that stimulated EH to start a project to codify its conservation philosophy into a set of understandable principles. These principles are based on a basic premise that places should be managed to sustain significance, now a familiar and widely accepted concept. To understand the significance of any place, whether it is a building like Southside, an archaeological landscape, or an urban conservation area, it is necessary to establish its value to society. That value comprises both the relative value of its individual components and the value of the whole in relation to other places. This exercise requires us to measure its significance against a set of values that we as a society hold generally valid. If we can do this we can overcome the individualistic, stylistic and dogmatic attitudes that tend to dominate and confuse arguments about conservation. So EH adopted four values as the basis for evaluating the historic significance of a place: Evidential value; Historical value; Aesthetic value and Communal value. Now these are clearly not the only the values that can be used to assess the significance of places, but they are the ones that encapsulate heritage value. Other values such as utility, economy and environmental sustainability are also sometimes employed and may, at some stage in the planning process, have to be weighed against heritage value. But the four heritage values can be applied to any development, of any age, and help us make a judgement on how significant it is. They can then help us to decide what to keep, what to adapt, whether to repair, and if so, how authentically. Just to clarify what we mean by these values I will give you a few examples in relation to well-known modernist buildings. So there may be evidential value in, for instance, the physical record of innovative construction and materials in buildings such as Peter Jones Sloane Square. There may be historic value in a building being the first of its kind such as the Boots Factory, Nottingham. Or its historic value may lie in that fact that it is illustrative of a pivotal point in history. Buildings may be associated with particular events, institutions, activities or people like the Cold War installations at Upper Heyford, or the optimism behind the foundation of the Commonwealth at the Commonwealth Institute. The aesthetic value, of places like Centre Point in London with its rigorous design values, or the fortuitous or cumulative aesthetic value of places such as the ziggurat buildings at UEA. The communal values of places could be for post war town centre layouts of Coventry or Plymouth promoting the social value of pedestrian shopping areas and integrated parking or the campuses of new universities like UEA, Sussex and Kent, heralding an era of greater access to higher education; or perhaps the spiritual value of places of worship such as Coventry Cathedral. So how can these values help us make decisions about buildings like Southside Halls of Residence? Well the crucial thing is that they raise the debate about conservation above the Victorian philosophy of Ruskin and Morris for whom everything was based on the retention of the original fabric of a building. Almost all Conservation philosophy since foundation of the SPAB in 1871 has been based on the acceptance of the fact that the retention of the original fabric is the primary objective and, in fact, modern conservation legislation takes the same starting point. But this assumption must be questioned when we are dealing with a building like Southside Halls. The origins of this dilemma about the primacy of original fabric are found in the structures of the industrial revolution, just like the philosophy of modernism itself. Take the former grade I listed West Pier at Brighton for example. The individual iron components of the Pier, all mass produced, and many one of hundreds of identical components just must have a lesser significance than an individually carved stone roof boss on the nave of a medieval cathedral. The pier’s components were to an extent sacrificial. They could be unbolted and replaced if they corroded, deflected or suffered some damage. Their replacement by a new component did not in any way diminish the authenticity or significance of the pier. In other words the design of the pier - its aesthetic value was more important than its evidential value.

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